Time After Time (10 page)

“Doesn’t it? But things like that make the papers every day.”

Teddy merely nodded, the shrewd brown eyes unreadable, then began walking again. Noah followed, giving silent thanks that the lot was so overgrown with weeds, there were no bare patches where a track could present unexplainable and wholly damning evidence against Cal.

Other than three more scarred trees, the lot was innocent.

Noah walked her back to and through the gate,
locking it behind them and saying cheerfully, “The damage was done, but there’ll be no more kids with hatchets in there.”

She shook hands with him briskly. “Well, thanks for taking the trouble, Noah. I’ll be seeing you.” And she walked toward a small truck parked in front of the building.

Noah went inside, more troubled than relieved. He met Alex coming down the stairs and answered her quizzical look. “I told her it was kids with hatchets. She didn’t believe me, but didn’t question.”

Alex went through the open door into her loft, and he followed. The painters having finished in there, the furniture was back in place and the canvas covers gone. She sat down on the couch, absently picking up one of the decorative pillows and hugging it. The interlude on the stairs was hardly forgotten, but she was worried about losing Cal and still unsettled by her growing belief in destiny.

“Did she say she’d be back?”

“She said she’d be seeing me. And I’m willing to
bet we’ll be seeing her.” He sat down beside her on the couch.

“It isn’t fair,” she murmured. “Cal’s happy with me, and he would never hurt anyone.”

“Have you tried getting a special permit to keep him?”

“I never dared,” she confessed. “If they turned me down, the animal control people would know about him. Besides, I’ve never had a place they’d consider large enough to hold a lion.”

“Plenty of room here,” Noah pointed out carefully. “And you certainly have the owner’s permission to house a lion.” He could read the worry in her taut features, and he was still afraid she’d decide to leave in order to save her lion. She smiled at him with an obvious effort, and his heart ached because she was so lovely and so vitally important to him.

“Thanks, Noah. If this whole thing goes public, it’s nice to know I can count on your support.”

“That you have,” he confirmed lightly. “Always.”

Something about his voice caused Alex to
quickly change the subject. “You know, you’ve never told me anything about your background.”

“Nothing much to tell.”

“Fair trade,” Alex chided him. “If I remember correctly, I told you practically everything about me when we were still strangers in the dark.”

He chuckled. “Okay. What d’you want to know?”

“Everything, of course.”

“Should I start with my birth, or would you settle for a more recent history?”

“Noah!”

“Sorry. Well, I was born and raised in San Francisco, the genuinely brilliant son of proud parents who now live in Seattle. I have a younger sister in college in the East, and a younger brother who’s an attorney in Texas. After high school I joined the army, and after that I came back here to go to college. Since college I’ve traveled a bit for my work, but tend to stick pretty close to home, given a choice.

“I sleep with the window open, can’t carry a tune in a bucket, and dance passably well. I was taught to pick up after myself, don’t mind washing
dishes or taking out the garbage, and I can cook as long as it’s simple.”

“And you’re still running around loose?” she asked, trying not to laugh.

“I was saving myself for you,” he told her in a pained voice.

“Pardon me if I doubt that. You may not have been struck by cupid’s lightning, but I’ll bet you wandered out into the storm a few times.”

“I got my feet wet,” he admitted, laughter gleaming in his eyes. “A little experience never hurts.”

“Certainly not,” she agreed, straight-faced. “I hate heavy-handed amateurs.”

“Known a few of those, have you?”

“A few.”

“Well, I don’t claim to be an expert,” he said, “but I’ll forever deny being heavy-handed.”

While he was talking calmly, Noah had taken the pillow away from her and pulled her into his lap. Alex made no attempt to resist, nor did she comment on the actions immediately. When she did comment, it was in a very dry voice.

“You may not be heavy-handed, but you’re certainly a take-charge kind of man, aren’t you?”

Noah smiled down at her, eyes flaring. “Patience has its limits.”

“Stop roaring.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“I am not.” Alex put a hand against his chest to prevent him from drawing her closer. “Nor am I forgetting that this building is crammed with busy people, any one of whom may decide he needs one or both of us for something.”

His expression brightened. “You mean somebody could walk in and catch us in a compromising situation?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“We’re both over twenty-one,” he reminded her.

“Yes, but I embarrass easily.”

“You didn’t seem embarrassed a while ago.”

Alex wasn’t about to tell him she’d been too rattled by her own response to feel anything else. “You aren’t making this easy for me,” she murmured.

Noah smiled faintly, but his gaze was intent. “I’m not making it easy for me either. In case you hadn’t realized, sprite, I’m barely able to walk and talk at the same time when you’re around.”

“Be still my heart.” It took all the control at Alex’s command to voice the flippant comment, and she wished she
could
order that organ to stop pounding so erratically.

“You don’t believe me,” he decided wryly.

“I haven’t noticed you having any problems.”

“That’s because I’m being very macho. You know, laugh if it hurts, smile if it kills you.”

Alex wanted to be flippant again. She wanted to laugh and change the subject and get herself off his lap before she lost her head and her heart. But it was too late and she knew it. She had already lost her heart, and her head held nothing but memories imperfectly remembered, memories with beginnings but no endings.

What ending would this memory have?

“Noah—”

“Blue-ribbon judging panel still out?”

She couldn’t bear the half-shadowed look in his
eyes or the taut steadiness of his voice. “No.” Her hand rose of its own volition to touch his cheek. “No, the decision’s in.” She felt a muscle tense beneath her hand.

“Did we win?”

“We got—the blue.” She heard her own voice break, her throat closing up.

Noah pulled her closer, one hand cradling the back of her head gently. She could feel a pulse throbbing in his throat and she snuggled even nearer, hiding her face because she was afraid of what he might have read in it.

“So we have … more than a beginning?” he asked.

Alex managed a shaky laugh. “That depends on you. I—I want more than a beginning.”
I want a lifetime!
“More than just the moment.”

He felt a jagged sense of relief that she was at least willing to try, at least sure he was important to her. But he couldn’t help remembering she had told him once she wasn’t looking for a ring and a promise.

He was important—but for how long?

Steadily he said, “Then we have more than a beginning. Because I want more too.”

Ladders and paint buckets clattered loudly on the stairs outside the loft, and Alex smiled regretfully at him as she raised her head.

“Never the time and the place …” he muttered, as regretful as she.

Alex got to her feet, feeling again a wrenching sense of loss when she left his embrace. “You’re spending a fortune to convert this building,” she reminded him. “Those guys have to work. And so do I.”

He stood, smiling. “I know. Well, the sooner we get to it, the sooner it’s finished. Then there’ll be time for us.”

T
HE CAMPSITE WAS
bare and empty, only the blackened pits of their fires remaining to give evidence of the Gypsies’ stay.

He felt cold; emptiness ached in him. Gone. She was gone. Why? For the dear Lord’s sake—why? Surely she had not put any credence in the jeering disbelief of her brothers? She could not have doubted he’d come back.

Obviously she
had
doubted.

With a muttered curse he turned and strode
toward his waiting horse. He would find her. Somehow. If he had to search the world, he’d find her.

Noah woke with a start, his heart pounding and his chest hurting as though he had run a very great distance. He lay in the darkness of his bedroom and listened to the predawn silence, waiting for his pulse to slow and for the ache in his chest to ease.

It took a long time.

And he couldn’t stop remembering the dream. It had been so vivid, so eerily real. He had felt pain and known the determination of a man driven to search for a Gypsy girl with green eyes.

Green eyes …

He linked his hands together behind his neck, staring up at the dim ceiling with a frown. He could remember another dream, one with soldiers and a blond woman, and himself wounded and hidden away in a musty barn. And now this odd dream, with himself another man, in search of a Gypsy girl. It made no sense, he thought. Unless …

The instant a wild supposition crossed his mind,
Noah rejected it. Dreams, he decided firmly, were merely the aimless ramblings of the subconscious. No more than that.

His decision made, a certain relief enabled Noah to turn over and try to go back to sleep. The present, he thought, was difficult enough to handle without additional problems from the past. Alex had as good as said he was important to her, that he mattered, but if anything, she seemed more elusive than ever.

And believing he was her “blue-ribbon affair” was, after all, no more than a belief. Alex could easily decide she had been mistaken, and vanish from his life. Noah was determined to prove to her that their relationship was indeed what both of them had wanted and needed, but he was worried that Cal’s possible exposure would rob all of them of needed time.

He didn’t want Alex to lose Cal. But, even more, he didn’t want to lose Alex.

The work on the building had reached a critical point during the past several days—critical in more ways than one. The place was full of workmen;
decisions were required of either Alex or Noah or both of them constantly, and Cal and Buddy had been shifted from one loft to another. The cats could safely remain in Alex’s loft now since the workmen were finished there, but Theodora Suzanne Jessica Tyler had shown up without warning more than once, and Noah could feel the tension behind Alex’s smiling façade.

Noah had said there would be time for them, and he hadn’t pushed. They were always exhausted at day’s end, content to share a meal and talk quietly for a while before turning in. He wanted more, needed more, but he was strongly aware that Alex required the peace of mind that only Cal’s safety would give her. As for his own peace of mind …

He swore softly and pounded his pillow, closing his eyes. If only she would promise to stay.

It was a long time before Noah fell asleep, dreaming more peculiar dreams in which he was a stranger and a participant. This time there was a blond woman with green eyes in his arms, in an
unfamiliar room before a roaring fire, and there was a blue uniform lying nearby on the floor….

The wagon jolted and rattled, and the wavering image of the manor house was lost to sight behind the trees. She dashed a hand across her wet eyes, swearing in a weak imitation of her brothers. It served her right, they’d said, falling in love with an earl’s son—the nobility loved easily and briefly, and a poor Gypsy girl would never be a countess. They had laughed and sneered, and shown her the gold he’d paid them to take her away.

And now she was going.

But she was leaving her heart behind with the man who had trampled it.

Alex pushed the dream out of her thoughts as she showered and got ready to face another day. It was just another depressing indication, she thought tiredly, of fate taking a cruel twist. The night before last she had watched a blue-clad soldier
ride away from her in a dream, and last night she had seen the Gypsy girl abandoned.

She pulled on jeans and a light sweater, brushed her hair automatically and left it free around her face. She stared into her bedroom mirror for a long moment, looking into green eyes that were dark and anxious.

“You’ve lost him twice,” she murmured to her reflection. “What makes you think you’ll win this time? Third time lucky?”

Alex was hardly convinced that failure in the past automatically meant failure in the future, but she was worried. Fate seemed set against her in the person of an animal control officer and in the intrusive presence of a building full of workmen.

More than once during these past days Alex had wanted to throw herself at Noah and beg him to take her away somewhere. But this place had come to mean home because she was putting her mark on it and because he was here, and a part of her was unwilling to run away without first attempting to fight. She was torn between an urge to
protect Cal at all costs and an ever-growing need for Noah.

She was sick with dread at the fear that she’d have to choose at some point between the man she loved and the lion she’d protected for more than six years.

And all at once it was just too much. A temper that the years had taught her—for the most part—to control snapped. Alex didn’t like not to be in control of her life; she didn’t like the feeling that she was half mad because she was remembering other lives; she didn’t like being on guard and uneasy out of fear for Cal; and most of all—
most of all
—she was furious that circumstances had conspired to taunt her with her love for a man she just might have already lost twice.

Very steadily she walked into the living area of the loft, crossed to the couch, and bent to pick up a pillow.

When Noah hastily opened the door to Alex’s loft, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What
met his incredulous, fascinated gaze, however, was a scene he would recall in later years with a grin.

Cal, his little white Buddy sitting trustfully between the great paws, lay sprawled on the carpeted platform, and both were observing their mistress with a comical serenity.